R Trader terminal overview or How to trade stocks and indices on Autopilot

Hello everyone!

As you probably already know, it is easier to trade shares than currencies. They have less noise and the technical analysis works better on them. On the stock charts, trends are much more clearly visible, besides they are much more durable and stable. At the same time, the dream of many is to establish their own expert adviser, and let him trade and make a profit instead of us.

Today we will get acquainted with such a platform where our dream can come true. And, to create a robot, we do not have to learn programming for years.

For quite a long time, the Roboforex broker has been able to trade quite a wide range of stocks and indexes using the R Trader web platform, which brings together about 8700 tools. They are stocks, indices, crypto-currencies, and currency pairs that we are accustomed to. Despite this diversity, such a service until recently was not very prominent among other competitors, but everything changed with the possibility of literally a couple of mouse clicks to write your own bot absolutely without any programming knowledge. Also, to test on historical data in a matter of seconds and launch an army of robots even on every chart of almost nine thousand instruments.

We will discuss this unique opportunity today. We will analyze the finished samples and write our own first robot, and discuss the positive and negative aspects of this approach. So, let’s get started.

R Trader Platform

After clicking the link, you will get to the page telling about all advantages of the terminal. If you are not yet a Roboforex customer, you will have to register. Otherwise, you just need to find the enter button on the upper right side and click it:

Immediately you can open a real account or save the settings of the desktop (graphics and everything that is written on them:

This is what the terminal looks like:

Area 1 is intended for analysis of tool charts. Area2 - the current status of your account - account type and leverage, balance, equity, margin, profit and so on. Panel 3 allows you to view active positions and orders, as well as history. That’s where is the main object of our interest - the strategies designer. Panel 4 allows you to trade manually:

As you can see, available are both market orders, as well as limit and stop orders. On the panel 5, you can find a list of tools that you can supplement with your own ones using the “Add” button.

In addition, between the 1 and 3 panel, you can notice a small button that allows you to adjust the proportions between panels - increase the space for the graphic or for the toolbar. Between panels 1-3 and 4-5, there is a small button that allows you to remove panels 4 and 5 from the screen.

On panel 6, you can monitor the status of the terminal - this is similar to the panel of the familiar MetaTrader 4. I will not go into the graphs customization panel - they are similar to those in the MT4 terminal and are probably a little worse than them, or maybe not worse at all.

In addition to the main functionality here you will find quite a wide set of visual display of the graph. In general, the interface is very convenient and it looks very nice. Understanding the purpose of each of the interface elements can be very quick, for which special thanks to UI / UX designer of the terminal creator. But, back to the main topic of the article:

On the top panel, you can see five tabs - positions, active orders, history, orders and strategy designer. It is the designer that interests us the most.

Panel 1 already has several preinstalled advisers, which will serve as a good example to start with. Also at the end of the list of predefined strategies, you will find the “Add a new one” button. In panel 2, you will find a description of the strategy.

Let’s create our strategy first:

Press the “Add new strategy” button, come up with the name, click “Continue”, write (or do not write) the description of the strategy and click “Finish”. Now the strategy will appear in the “My Strategies” list. Let’s start creating by clicking the “Editor” button:

As you can see, the rules of the system are created almost on the machine from the ready blocks. When you click on ‘+’ below the “Buy” line, a rule to open a long position is added. You can choose one of the many indicators divided into four groups:

These groups - trend, oscillators, volumes, and volatility, among which you will find all the standard indicators for MT4. Also can be used for the conditions and price of the instrument:

In addition, you can select the minimum and maximum price values for a certain period. For oscillators, for example, you can select the “value” parameter and use it as the overbought / oversold level, as I did:

As you can see, I have two rules for opening a buy position - the value of the oscillator should be below the oversold zone, and prices should be above the moving average. The “AND” condition, if necessary, can be changed to “OR”.

You can also create rules to close the transaction, as well as the installation of stop-loss and take profits, both in points and in percentages. If desired, you can create an exit rule that describes the trailing stop on the moving average, for example.

You can also add exit time in bars. In the picture below, stop loss and take profit are set.

An interesting option is “Opening every 1% below the last entry” for sales and above for purchases:

This option allows you to make a refill on the trend, or top up when you find the position at a loss. I created a trend strategy, so it would be appropriate to add to the trend.

A complex strategy is unlikely to be created, but we do not need it - with such an abundance of tools, it is difficult not to pick up several suitable tools, even for the simplest TS. Here’s what gives me a freshly created strategy on the US500 tool (S&P 500):

Here, I applied the simplest trend strategy: if the price is above the exponential moving average with a period of 100 and the CCI dropped below -200 (that is, we have a trend up and a current rollback), then the strategy involves entering the purchase. For sales, the price should be under EMA, and CCI should be in an overbought zone.

Yes, the chart is not the most beautiful and saturated with periods of deep drawdowns, but, nevertheless, we earned slightly more than $10,000 with a drawdown five times smaller than the profit, which is pretty good. Also, the strategy showed itself well on the NAS100 index (NASDAQ100):
Therefore, you can decide to put a strategy on these two tools. But before doing this, you need to evaluate the strategy taking into account all commissions and other costs:

If the result satisfies us, you can safely press the “Start” button. After that, the strategy will appear in the “Active Strategies” tab. Here’s how it looks:

The tool, working period, strategy name, start time, earned a profit (or loss), as well as unrecorded profit or loss, are displayed. Now the terminal can be turned off, and the strategy will continue to work without any VPS and even without our participation.

Conclusion

The R Trader terminal, undoubtedly, is very convenient and intuitively easy to handle. Also, a big plus is the lack of the need to keep it open and, as a result, saving on VPS. The very development of the strategy takes no more than an hour, and its testing on one instrument - a few seconds. Therefore, even with such a variety of instruments available for trading, testing of the strategy will take no more than a couple of free evenings, and the number of these instruments virtually guarantees the availability of a dozen of the most suitable for any, even the simplest TS.

The disadvantages of the terminal are the impossibility of testing on several instruments at once, the absence of even the simplest parameter optimizer, the display of perfect transactions on the tool chart and the choice of dates for backtesting, because theoretically we might create a strategy with optimal parameters for one of the 8700 tools, so this way overoptimizing it, but this is unlikely.

Even despite the disadvantages of the platform, its positive sides are quite attractive, and the terminal itself is pleasant to use - quiet color scheme, thoughtful interface, good performance and high-quality implemented, albeit a little poor functionality will not leave you indifferent - personally, I will look at the work of the robots I created on the demo account.

Regards, Michael

ForexTraderPortal.com